Pierluigi Paganini July 13, 2024

Ukrainian national Vyacheslav Igorevich Penchukov was sentenced to prison for his role in Zeus and IcedID malware operations.

The U.S. DoJ sentenced the Ukrainian national Vyacheslav Igorevich Penchukov (37) to prison and ordered him to pay millions of dollars in restitution for his role in the Zeus and IcedID malware operations.

Penchukov pleaded guilty to his key roles in the Zeus and IcedID malware operations in February 2024.

In October 2022, Swiss police arrested Penchukov in Geneva, also known as Tank, which is one of the leaders of the JabberZeus cybercrime group.

The man was extradited to the United States in 2023, he was included in the FBI’s “Most Wanted” list and has been sought for 10 years.

In 2012, Vyacheslav Igorevich Penchukov was accused of being a member of a cybercrime gang known as JabberZeus crew. JabberZeus was a small cybercriminal ring that was targeting SMBs with a custom-made version of the Zeus banking trojan. At the time, DoJ accused Penchukov of coordinating the exchange of stolen banking credentials and money mules and received alerts once a bank account had been compromised.

The popular investigator Brian Krebs reported that Gary Warner, director of research in computer forensics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, noted in 2014 that Tank told co-conspirators in a JabberZeus chat on July 22, 2009 that his daughter, Miloslava, was and told him Miloslava birth weight.

Warner explained that Tank was identified by searching Ukrainian birth records for the only girl named Miloslava born on that day with a specific birth weight.

Krebs pointed out that Penchukov was able to evade prosecution by Ukrainian authorities for many years due to his political connections. The late son of former Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych would serve as godfather to Tank’s daughter Miloslava.

Two other members of the gang, Yevhen Kulibaba and Yuriy Konovalenko, were arrested in 2014 and pleaded guilty. Both were sentenced to two years and ten months of incarceration in May 2015 followed by a supervised release of 1 year.

Since May 2019, Penchukov had a prominent role in the Zeus operation. From at least November 2018 through February 2021, Penchukov helped lead a conspiracy that infected victim computers with IcedID or Bokbot.

This week Wired reported that Penchukov was sentenced to nine years in federal prison and three years of supervised release. He pleaded guilty to one count of racketeering conspiracy and one count of wire fraud conspiracy.

The man was also condemned to pay $73 million in restitution.

Pierluigi Paganini

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(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Vyacheslav Igorevich Penchukov)